#i got inspired by uh. britney spears lyrics.

[coridallasmultipass]

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[avaantares]

I... I just... ZOMG1, there is so much to unpack here.

I mean... yes, please please please DO know the difference between Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, who are both important musicians (in very different genres). But before we even get to that--

Are we all just gonna overlook TikTok!OP calling Bob Dylan a "niche underground obscure singer"????? BOB DYLAN? One of the most influential artists of the 20th century?? THE MAN HAS BEEN AWARDED BOTH A PULITZER AND A NOBEL PRIZE FOR HIS SONGWRITING, to say nothing of his Grammy/Oscar/Golden Globe wins. He's in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. His songs have been recorded by over 2,000 artists. He's been called "the Shakespeare of his generation."

All that to say, he's about as "niche" or "obscure" as Elvis Presley or the Beatles (who cited Dylan as a direct inspiration on their work, actually). please tell me you've at least heard of Elvis and the Beatles

Look, I recognize that people born in a year beginning with 2 probably haven't been exposed to enough music of earlier generations to be able to recognize it, or even draw connections between artistic influences (and don't get me started on the removal of humanities like music appreciation from our schools, I have Opinions). But if you have heard of Bob Dylan at all, you should know that he is far from an unknown artist. He is one of the giants of the music world. His work is so widely recognized as an important literary and cultural milestone that it's a frequent subject of dissertations and doctoral theses.

Pop culture does not develop in a vacuum, and many, MANY modern artists are still directly influenced by Dylan's work. If you've listened to any artist from the past 50 years who has employed lyrics to criticize things like modern society, the state of race relations, acts of war, political themes, etc., that's all Dylan. His emphasis on lyrics as poetry and songs as vehicles of social commentary (believe it or not, those were new and revolutionary concepts at one time!) changed popular music irrevocably. He's been credited with inspiring the entire punk rock movement.

He's also sold upwards of 145 million albums, and currently ranks as the 33rd best-selling recording artist of all time, putting him ahead of artists like BTS, David Bowie, Britney Spears, Aerosmith, Prince, Adele, Paul McCartney, and so on. And that's just his own recordings, not counting the hundreds of songs that he wrote and other artists recorded.

Anyway, he's super famous, not some underground indie guy nobody's heard of, which is probably why he's getting a biopic starring everyone's pet waif Timothee Champagneflute.

Also... he's, uh, not Black. (Reggae pioneer Bob Marley, however, is.)

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Had to come back and edit to add this, because this Simon & Garfunkel lyric has been running through my head ever since I wrote the above rant, and it's hilarious that the situation has flipped 180 degrees since this song was recorded:

I knew a man, his brain was so small He couldn't think of nothing at all Not the same as you and me He doesn't dig poetry He's so unhip that when you say Dylan He thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas Whoever he was The man ain't got no culture But it's alright, ma, everybody must get stoned

-- "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission)"

don't know where2 start w this 1

[swiftlyts7]

Taylor Swift’s “ME!” Lyrics Show An Unhealthy Relationship

I found this article online and I want to hear your thoughts. Comment and reblog. We got some ME! tea to talk about. I know it is a lot, BUT PLEASE READ THIS WHOLE THING!!!! 

Taylor Swift’s and Brendon Urie’s new song “ME!” is a lot of things: the beginning of a new T.Swift musical era, pastel outfit inspiration, an extremely catchy bop. One thing it’s not? A portrayal of a healthy relationship.Now, the dramatic, French-language introduction to the music video might have tipped you off on this. The scene shows a couple, played by Swift and Urie, fighting about something unspecified in front of their “two young daughters,” aka Taylor Swift’s cats (“JE SUIS CALME!”).After the fight, Swift leaves their apartment, and the scene quickly transitions into a playful, pastel dreamscape as the song begins. She strolls through a ballroom full of clouds and dances in a town full of suited-up women. As she perches on a unicorn-shaped rooftop, wearing a gorgeous pink gown that turns into a waterfall, Urie arrives via umbrella, Mary Poppins-style. He earns back Swift's affection with a new kitten, after she rejects a bouquet and an engagement ring. The two spend the rest of the music video as a happy couple, performing in matching heart-covered outfits, giving us a spelling lesson via marching band, and dancing beneath a thunderstorm of rainbow-colored paint.A happy ending, right? Well, let’s look closer. Throughout the song, the lyrics describe a couple that fights... a lot. Some lines Swift sings include, “I know that I’m a handful, baby, uh / I know I never think before I jump,” “I know that I went psycho on the phone / I never leave well enough alone,” and “And when we had that fight out in the rain / You ran after me and called my name.”Urie’s lines also describe fighting — and assert that the relationship is more interesting because of the fights. “I know that I tend to make it about me / I know you never get just what you see / But I will never bore you, baby / And there’s a lot of lame guys out there,” he sings.Each chorus contains the line “I promise that you’ll never find another like me,” which, eventually, turns into, “I promise that nobody’s gonna love you like me.”While we’ve been humming this song all day, let’s take a step back a minute and look at what those lyrics actually say about a relationship. If your friend had a boyfriend she argued with all the time, who convinced her to stay in the relationship by telling her that nobody else would ever love her in the same way and that relationships without fights were boring, what would you say to her? You'd go full Britney-Spears-DUMP-HIM-tee, right? And while many fans are loving Swift’s new song, others have concerns. “I am a @taylorswift13 fan, but I am tired of hearing strong females apologize for their ‘psycho’ behaviors on the phone, and then act bubbly and nothing is wrong instantly continuing the stereotype of a loving relationship is filled w/ drama,” Allie McCarthy Platt tweeted.Platt tells Refinery29, “Honestly, there have been numerous songs of Taylor’s I’ve loved and encouraged confidence, but ‘ME!’ is not one of them. Personally, I am finding myself and other 30-somethings are having to do a lot of work not bringing the drama (we are the ghosting and need-for-answers culture) we experienced in our teens and twenties into healthy relationships/marriages because media painted women’s emotions as ‘psycho’ or ‘over-the-top.'" She adds, "The scene at the beginning of her screaming, ‘I’m calm!’ was quite jarring and triggering and not something I want younger generations to experience or emulate.”@Dalilahber found the "nobody's ever gonna love you like me" line particularly troubling. She tweeted, "ok the idea behind taylor swifts new song is nice and all - everyone appreciates a good pastel rainbow, but the implication that 'nobody will ever love you like me' is such a manipulative concept that keeps people in abusive relationships. 'ME!' isn’t pop anthem material srry."She adds to Refinery29, "In general, I feel that telling a romantic partner 'I promise that nobody's gonna love you like me' might have good intentions, but the insinuation that their future partners won't be comparable is manipulative and could make one party feel trapped or afraid to end their relationship. It makes people feel obligated to settle in an unhealthy relationship."Now, Taylor Swift can sing about an unhealthy relationship without the song being about her own life, and without the song being a guide for what fans should aim for in their own relationships. But this music video doesn’t have the tongue-in-cheek vibe that, for example, “Blank Space” does. So when it comes to “ME!", go ahead embrace the pastel butterfly aesthetic… but leave those unhealthy relationship dynamics alone.

[lanavault]

Spotlight #2: Lana Del Rey and The Nexus

All Images: © Nicole Nodland, Aug. 2010

London-based writing and production duo James Bauer-Mein and David Sneddon became The Nexus in July 2009. Within a year the duo had begun to make a name for themselves as the place to go for new artist development; enter Lana Del Rey.  Spending a large portion of 2010 in London with other writers and producers such as The Rural, Del Rey added a further five songs to her repertoire as a result of her sessions with The Nexus.

1. National Anthem “Money is the anthem of success, so before we go out, what’s your address?” is how Del Rey opens the track I Want It All; the song that she had penned with writer Justin Parker which underwent a few minor revisions before becoming National Anthem. With Bauer-Mein and Sneddon credited as co-writers on the track, as well as backing vocals for the spoken male soundbites, multiple demos of I Want It All were produced before it was decided that the chorus would be left on the cutting room floor in favour of the now quintessential Lana Del Rey lyric, “Tell me I’m your national anthem”. Likely intended to be the final product, the Nexus version of National Anthem is a joy. Running on a sleek bass guitar riff, Del Rey is as cool as ever. Enamoured by an excessive and luxurious lifestyle, it’s an over-indulgent all-American anthem. So it was only fitting that Del Rey would film her own DIY webcam music video for the track in Las Vegas’ Wynn Encore 2,261-square-foot Salon suite, which has a standing rate of around $750 per night.

The production by The Nexus was eventually laid bare, and producer Emile Haynie introduced a more sinister tone to the track, with an orchestral string section being added by Daniel Heath before making it’s way on to Del Rey’s major label debut, Born To Die, in 2012. When the song became a single, Del Rey wrote a new treatment for the music video, based upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The singer was depicted as icons Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whilst rapper A$AP Rocky was enlisted to play President JFK. Filmed on location at New York’s Gould-Guggenheim Estate, the Anthony Mandler directed video has since amassed over 66 million views, whereas the song has been streamed nearly 75 million times on Spotify. 2. Prom Song (Gone Wrong) Prom Song (Gone Wrong) was made available through a public upload on The Nexus’ Soundcloud account, although with Del Rey’s name not being attributed to the track it went unnoticed for a period of time, and a while after its discovery it was taken down. Prom Song is an autobiographical part-fantastical account of Del Rey’s experience in high school. A young woman with wanderlust, Del Rey dreams about escapism from the “teenage wasteland” of Kent boarding school with her english teacher Gene Campbell, whom she was particularly fond of. “You’d play me Biggie Smalls and then my first Nirvana song”, she sings in the song’s second verse. The teacher clearly had a profound impact upon his student, as Del Rey has gone on to credit Campbell as the person who taught her who the “greats of every genre” were in various interviews, particularly this extract from a June 2014 cover story with Clash magazine:

“When I was 15, I had this teacher called Gene Campbell, who is still my good friend, in boarding school, to become a teacher you don’t have to have a Masters. I was 15 and he was 22, out of Georgetown. He was young, and at school you were allowed to take trips out at the weekends. On our driving trips around the Connecticut counties, he introduced me to Nabokov, (Allen) Ginsberg, (Walt) Whitman, and even Tupac and Biggie. He was my gateway to inspirational culture. Those inspirations I got when I was 15 are still my only inspirations.”

3. Driving In Cars With Boys Two versions of Driving In Cars With Boys exist. Dream-like, on the first version Del Rey is singing in a higher register, sounding like a girl who knows far too well how to hide her mischief. Whilst the second version, which also came from The Nexus’ Soundcloud account along with Prom Song, is sung a lower husky tone and subtracts a few of the lyrics which appear in the pre-chorus of the first version. “I’ve spent my whole life driving in cars with boys / Riding round town drinking in the white noise / Used to talk about where we’d be and where we’d go / Now we know, baby now we know”, Del Rey looks back retrospectively at the wildness of adolescence, memories she also drew upon for Born To Die album track This Is What Makes Us Girls. The singer likely drew inspiration from the 1992 Beverly Donofrio memoir Riding In Cars With Boys, about drinking, driving, smoking and rebelling. Driving In Cars was one of the 19 songs forwarded to the Guardian for their profile promoting the emerging singer in May of 2011. The reviewer pointed out how Del Rey “shoo-shoos like a Shirelle” whilst declaring she’s the desire of all the boys who already have girlfriends. 4. She’s Not Me On She’s Not Me, Del Rey is feisty and angry. The opening wah-wah guitars and Del Rey’s jazzy ad-libs wouldn’t sound out of place in the score to a David Lynch movie. Whilst the decidedly uncharacteristically Lana Del Rey ad-libs of “Uh! Let’s go” would feel more at home on a Britney Spears cut from the early 2000’s. Feeding her jealous side, the singer spends the entirety of the track taunting an ex-lover over the fact that her presence will always be with him, “I have left my mark on you / There is nothing you can do”, whilst reminding him that his new girl will never be the “ride or die bitch” bombshell that she is. “When you think you’re over me and your bad baby’s dead and gone / Remember I’m the ghost in your machine / I’m your real life suicide blonde”.